This isn't the first time. In the 1950s, the founder of Berkeley JPL, an MIT professor who was one of the forefathers of NASA and Manhattan Project contributor, and who Theodore von Karman called a generational genius, Chinese educated Qian Xuesen was humiliated with accusations of being a communist spy and given a multi-year house arrest where he couldn't work so that his knowledge would fall behind the state of the art. He was then deported, and went back to China where he created the Chinese space program entirely from scratch. In China today, he's widely known as a national hero and the "father of Chinese rocketry". If you really want your mind blown, look up his family tree and see how many Nobels and National Science Medals are related to him.
The past few years alone has seen some really high profile scientists taking their knowledge and experience with them to China. These are people who've spent 30+ years building lives here in the US, and were initially being forced out, but now are actually being lured with better pay packages and working conditions since the first wave was treated so well. It's absolutely insane.